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On an average day, tens of millions of people visit The New York Times Games section to solve the latest crossword puzzle, keep their Wordle streak alive, or see if they can figure out the mystery of that day’s Connections puzzle. Two-thirds of the site’s weekly visitors play two or more games. Half play four or more. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, The Times only occasionally releases new game offeringstypically one per year. So that makes Monday’s release of Pips, the latest permanent addition to the collection especially significant. It’s not only new, it’s a new kind of puzzle, eschewing wordplay for logic. And if the reactions to the beta test (which launched in Canada in April)and the outcry when The Times took the game offline for final polishingare any indication, the company might have found its next big hit. Reddit users have been mourning its absence for over a month, debating whether the game would return and when. Reviews of the beta were glowing, calling it “a brilliant fusion of classic gaming elements and modern puzzle design.” “We wanted to do something that was original and fresh, but still familiar,” says Jonathan Knight, senior vice president and head of games at The New York Times. Pips was first proposed last year and the team has been working on it throughout 2025. It’s a puzzle-based take on dominoes that lets users choose between three difficulty levels. Each game board has a series of conditions (for instance, in some regions, you must have the same number of pips, the dots on a domino, in each box, while in others, the pips must add up to a certain number). Like sudoku, it’s about balance. You have to place your dominoes in a pattern that satisfies all of the different requirements. Easy puzzles in Pips have players placing four or five dominoes. Hard ones will have up to 16. There are no time limits. If you get the puzzle wrong, you can go back and continue working on it. And the game will show you the areas you need to correct. “It’s very hard in life to finish anything,” says Ian Livengood, puzzle editor of Pips. “So there’s something very satisfying about being able to finish [this game].” [Image: The New York Times] Hooking the player In a world where it’s increasingly difficult to capture people’s attention, The Times has had incredible success. Last year, its puzzles were played 11.1 billion times. Of that number, nearly half was focused on Wordle, which was played 5.3 billion times in 2024. (Every minute, the company says, more than 2,000 people share their Wordle score.) Connections, introduced in 2023, was played 3.3 billion times. The Games team says it doesn’t focus on those numbers, but it does challenge itself to create titles that draw people back again and again. Most ideas don’t make the cut. Several dozen concepts are pitched each year, from all corners of the company via hackathons and other initiatives. The majority of those concepts don’t get too far. Some, like Zorse (a phrase-guessing game introduced last year) get as far as public beta tests before they’re rejected. It comes down, generally, to the elusive fun factor. “We focus very much first on the mechanics and finding the fun,” says Knight. With Pips, he says, there weren’t a lot of major changes from the game’s concept to its final execution. Most of the evolution was in how the game visually communicated the requirements of the puzzle to the player. Livengood says the hook for Pips as well as other Times games is their level of visual clarity. They’re not designed to overwhelm you. You can look at the games and generally figure out what you’re supposed to do in a very short amount of time. While games like Candy Crush use AI to create and optimize levels, puzzles at The New York Times, whether in Pips, Wordle, or any other game, are handcrafted. “There’s always a person behind the game,” Livengood says. “And increasingly, with AI and computer-generated algorithms, that feels almost refreshing. It’s comforting knowing there’s a person behind it.” A less-is-more approach also helps draw people back in. Times games are designed to only take a few minutes, then you’re free (and encouraged) to go about your day. “It fits into your life,” says Knight. “We’re not trying to get you to stay in our app 24 hours a day. We’re not nagging you constantly. A healthy, time well-spent cadence has been what makes us so successful.” Pips could get people to stick around a little longer, though. With three possible daily puzzles, people who get hooked could opt to play more than once per day. Pips is also the first new game from the Times team that will launch simultaneously on both the web and on the app. (Traditionally, games would launch on one first, then the other months later.) “That represents us getting stronger and better at what we’re doing,” says Knight.
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E-Commerce
The retail clothing chain FatFace has confirmed to Fast Company that it will be closing 23 of its stores in the United States and Canada. Heres what you need to know about the companys shuttering of stores. Whats happened? Retail clothing chain FatFace has confirmed to Fast Company that it will be shuttering 23 stores in the United States and Canada. FatFace is a U.K.-based lifestyle, accessory, and apparel store that was founded in 1988. In 2023, British fashion retail giant Next bought the company for around $140 million. But in the years since the acquisition, physical brick-and-mortar retailers have struggled, leading to numerous high-profile chains shuttering their stores. Major retail chains that have shuttered stores in the past few years have included furnishings retailer At Home, fashion and accessories retailer Claires, and discount retailer Big Lots. The Express says that FatFaces decision to close its North American locations is due to economic uncertainty and increased costs. The company told Fast Company that rising costs made the physical store model unviable at this time. FatFace says the closure of its North American stores will impact 145 jobs. FatFace lives on overseas and online However, while FatFace has confirmed that it is closing its North American locations, the brand will still live on overseas and online. After the North American stores are shuttered, FatFace will continue to sell its wares to Canadian and U.S. customers online. The company will also continue to operate the 175 brick-and-mortar stores it currently has in the United Kingdom. But any future expansion plans the company has in the works seem to be digital only. FatFace says it will expand its online offerings to additional countries beyond the U.S. and the U.K. in the future. North American FatFace store locations FatFace did not provide a list of its closing locations or a date by which they would be permanently shuttered. But all of its 23 existing locations in the United States are scheduled to close for good in 2025. Those seeking a list of where the FatFace stores are in North America should be aware that the company has confirmed to Fast Company that its online store locator tool for North America is not currently accurate. As of the time of this writing, that online store locator tool lists more than 60 locations currently operating in the United States and Canada. But FatFace told Fast Company that the brand only has 23 locations left in North America. Retail store closures could hit 15,000 in 2025 FatFace isnt the only retailer facing store closings this yearand it likely wont be the last. According to a January report from Coresight Research, up to 15,000 retail stores in the United States could close by the end of the year. That would represent a 50% increase from the 10,000 that closed in 2020 as the pandemic depressed in-store shopping. The main driver behind the expected closures, Coresight says, is increased online competition and inflationary pressures.
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E-Commerce
When you consume a book, youre always making compromises. Print means no animation and no outbound links to enhance the reading experience. E-ink often yields potato-quality images and muted colors. An iPads LED-backlit display strains the eyes. Audiobooks, meanwhile, generally rely solely on the theater of the mind. But what if they didnt have to? Blending the audiobook experience with sight and sound might seem like fertile, if not obvious ground for innovationbut its not happening within a traditional publishing house. Rather, its happening at Spotify. While the majority of Spotifys audiobooks are currently just thataudiofor Bruce Holsingers summer hit Culpability and some 100 other books, Spotify has crafted something more. Through its new Follow Along feature, the company is bringing bespoke visuals and music to the mix, and nudges the form of the audiobook forward in the process. Spotify sounds off The feature, currently being tested, follows years of increased focus on the audiobook segment by the music streamer. Spotify launched an la carte audiobook offering in 2022, and then followed it with its Audiobooks in Premium program in 2023, granting premium subscribers 15 hours of books per month. The company currently has some 400,000 books under its belt, and is licensing, producing, and publishing more than 150 titles a year, and just last week launched a new $11.99 per month Audiobooks+ add-on, which grants 15 hours of listening on top of whatever plan one has. (Its a business expansion that perhaps comes at an ideal time for Spotify, which just reported a 12% year-over-year rise in subscribers to 276 millionbut also a Q2 net loss of around $100 million.) [Image: Spotify] ‘No shade on PDFs’ The Follow Along initiative spawned from the supplementary PDF files publishers provide with audiobooks, according to Niamh Parsley, Spotifys director of product design for audiobooks. Now, no shade on PDFs, Parsley says, I love a good PDF, but Spotify users werent engaging with those files much, even though they often contained rich imagery or tools to assist with the retention of complex topics. Follow Along emerged from a thought experiment about how Spotify could get more value out of its existing content. It really stemmed from real experiences, says Parsley. Wouldn’t it be cool if this cookbook that we have the audio for showed us the recipes so I can be inspired by it and be more likely to actually make the recipe? Rather than start with a wireframe filled with dummy text, she says the Spotify team led with the book’s actual content to create solutions organic to each book. When Follow Along first launched as a test last November, users discovered visual assets like photos and diagrams synced to the narration in real time in the Spotify app. But with the launch of the AI techno-thriller family drama Culpability last month, the team has taken the model to new levels. [Image: Spotify] New, custom visuals Even before Culpability became an Oprah’s Book Club pick, the Spotify team knew it’d be a hit, according to Associate Director of Audiobook Publishing Colleen Prendergast. Spotifys producer and casting director worked directly with author Bruce Holsinger to bring the experience to life, and hearing the narrators early recordings prompted the team to consider adding custom visuals to the mix for the first time. Her performance was so multifaceted, it inspired us to explore ways to make the listener experience on Spotify even more dynamic, recalls Prendergast. With publisher Spiegel & Grau on board, the team began identifying moments in the manuscript that lent themselves to visual storytelling. Rodrigo Corral Design Studio had created the books cover, so they brought Corral and his crew into the project as well. Ultimately, the team created more than 100 custom assets for the audiobook, from section headers to chat logs and conceptual images that echo the vibe of the cover. [Image: Spotify] We frequently create interior illustrations for printed books, but seeing these visuals integrated into the digital and audio space is genuinely new and exciting, says Anna Corral, partner at Rodgiro Corral. Of the process itself, she added, We worked to distill the emotional undercurrents into images that guide the listener ithout overexplaining, allowing the reader to reflect and make it their own. Of course, like anything new, you’ve got to figure out the best way to use itand while listening to Culpability, I likely no doubt missed certain visuals by virtue of not staring at my phone for the duration of the book, waiting to see what might pop up. Interfaces like Apple CarPlay also dont generally display visuals like these so as not to distract driversso in lieu of something like an audible chime to check your phone or tablet for a given image, you may need to hop over to the Extras section of the audiobook to find what you missed. The tune of the tomes In May, Spotify partnered with 33 , Bloomsburys cult-favorite line of books about popular albums, to add another Follow Along element that seems like a no-brainer for the streaming service: music. Now, when the audio books are probing an album or discussing a certain song, a link to it will appear in the app so users can save it to their library or listen in the moment. Currently, Follow Along is still a test feature. While Spotify declined to provide more robust usage metrics, Parsley noted that users actively engaging with the initial slate of titles’ supplementary material within the app increased by 245% over their former PDF counterparts. Publishers have been requesting the feature, according to Parsley. Spotify has also observed an increase in listeners per title, with the hypothesis there being that providing more visual-forward experiences can entice more listening, she says. Ultimately, Parsley sees opportunity for not just a new visual spin on an old form, but for the types of books associated with audiobooks at large. For instance, Billie Eilish released an audio component to her eponymous photo book, and Spotify created a Follow Along experience merging both. And therein lies perhaps the next unexpected frontier for audiobooks, which Parsley enthusiastically endorses: the humble coffee table tome. There’s a lot of untapped potential there [with] content that is visually based, and how we can create this multimodal experience around it, she says. The door is wide open right now because it is so earlyso it’s very exciting.
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E-Commerce
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